Intel's upcoming Haswell processor is likely to be as big an advance over today's Sandy and Ivy Bridge CPUs as the "Bridge sisters" were over the prior-gen Nehalem chips. That's huge progress, but how could Intel achieve such gains once again?

The answer comes down to three broad areas of change: a nicely improved CPU microarchitecture, design work more carefully tailored to 22-nm fabrication process, and quite likely an improved system architecture. We don't yet have details on the Haswell system architecture, but Intel has disclosed quite a bit about Haswell otherwise.